


In love with Love

by luna65



Category: Stone Temple Pilots - Fandom
Genre: Addiction, Co-Dependency, Everything is terrible, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, allusions of death, ambiguous perspective, but sometimes it's wonderful too, purposeful tense-shifting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5353415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The memories are many, and they run deep for us."</p><p>Love cannot hold back the void, love is not enough to appease the obsession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In love with Love

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this about 2-3 years ago after reading Scott's memoir but never posted it anywhere. Today it felt right to do so, to pay tribute. Hope you find where the river goes, Scott, and you have gone beyond all pain and sorrow.

"I believe that love only happens truly twice, but why, I wonder, does love always equal a broken heart?"  
\- Scott Weiland, _Not Dead & Not For Sale: A Memoir_

 

"He's not exactly normal."

Eric's observation wasn't unwelcome, but the tone of his voice rendered the statement - as with most things - in a rather smartass context. A mere flippant dismissal.

Robert took a swallow of beer, considering replies.

"Who is? You?"

"More than most, probably."

"Good for you."

"It's not an insult, not really."

Robert quirked an eyebrow. "So what are you saying?"

"Be careful. Damaged people are the ones you want everything for, but you don't have everything to give them."

Eric felt a certain satisfaction to watch a slow blush stain the other's cheeks, redden his slightly swarthy skin tone.

"Because you're not, right?"

Eric smiled, those surfer boy blond good looks he was often cited with entirely evident.

"My damage is minor, I'm lucky. But your eyes always turn to the dark corners first."

 _Oh fuck you_ , Robert wanted to say. He was the head diplomat, so he said nothing. But every musician knows that silence is just as expressive as sound.

 

"Heeeeey tall, dark and handsome."

Scott's tease is not merely fey, not merely quirky, he appreciates the inherent attractive potential in all situations. Making himself a symbol, a cipher, but one you couldn't resist. He wanted to embody the beauty which equally repels and attracts.

(He too sought that blush, that flush, that _what-do-you-think-you're-doing_ rush.)

Batting long-lashed dark eyes...eyes which Scott would say looked like _really expensive brandy, man, the good shit_...with a smirk edging into a smile. "Dude, I can't put you on the list tonight."

"Why not?" Scott was inching his way along a parking barrier, acting like a highwire artist with arms spread, his body taunt with ersatz concentration.

"Because they're gonna kick your ass for drinking all the beer again."

Scott continued to hold his head up, but a muscle in his cheek twitched, rippled, all that effort not to slip, not to fall apart.

"You guys suck anyway."

"Shut the fuck up - look, I'll come over after, okay? I've got new stuff to play for you."

Scott was ready to say it didn't matter, he liked to be alone and yet - those eyes reminded him that he wanted to connect, despite the pain. But he also wanted that golden bubble. He would bounce it all around, view the world from inside that space where there was no pain, no disappointment, no ambiguity, no desire to reject the things he knew could be wonderful things.

A shrug. "Yeah okay, whatever."

They parted, but they watched each other as the distance grew, not willing to yield to any force - casual or otherwise - which might steer them away from their connection, even for a few hours.

 

 

_Can you see what I want?_

He hid this extended dialog with his soul from everyone; they had allowed him to take his greatest talent and desire and use it as he longed to, but not every poem or lyric was offered up to the others, at least not right away. It was so easy, he wanted to climb into Rob's head sometimes and just listen to all the music inside of it.

"It's bad," he whispered to himself within a circle of 2 AM darkness, "to get what you want."

Everything was taken away, sooner or later. The only thing you could ever trust was to be alone.

But he liked to imagine a place where he could do whatever he wanted, feel whatever he wanted, receive whatever he wanted, and he would never be punished for any of it. And in that place they walked together and understood one another without saying a word.

 

 

There were tears. There were always tears, the later it got. It was 4 AM and Scott sobbed in his arms. Out of loss and pain and fear. In a moment in which there was nothing between his soul and the damage surrounding it, which did not protect as a scar might, but poisoned him instead.

"Why? Why did you have to make me hope for things?"

"What are you talking about?" Robert said into his hair. But he knew. "You're not trying to blame me for this, are you?"

"No man, I know it's all me, It's all in **my** head."

"You won't let me help you -"

"You can't help what's really wrong. This obsession, man, it's what I do. Things always mean something to me that they don't mean to anyone else."

Now Robert felt a lump in his throat, frustration and sorrow, and he didn't like all this pain. It felt so _unnecessary_.

"But I can't -"

"I know." He curled tighter within the embrace which held him. "You make me feel safe because you're so tall."

A snicker. But the silence hung heavy. The candles - candles which were always burning no matter where or when - flickered as their mutual exhalations surged within the space between them.

"Why do you make me feel this way?"

"Because you do it to me, I do it to you."

A series of infatuations moved through their lives, but their shared obsession truly ruled them.

They shifted positions, Robert picked up a guitar and played his latest idea and Scott allowed it to infect him. It always felt so good. And his collaborator was relieved to see even a ghost of a smile surface in that gaunt and drawn face.

 

 

There was a lot of laughter, and it would be wrong to assume it was all silence and paranoia. They were noisy, all of them, fiercely opinionated and passionate, and they developed a shared insular type of humor which all bands tend to do, when you have to spend so much time together caring about what you do.

There was a lot of laughter, and there was love. Sometimes it's love which is the real problem. Love brings expectations, and disappointment when they are not met.

 

 

"You talk about all the people who broke your heart, and that you can't ever love that way again. But **you** \- you're the one who broke **my** heart, you fucker. You're the one I would do _anything_ for, except maybe the one thing you want me to do."

That intensity - the deep dark intensity of Robert DeLeo which was both his greatest strength and his terrible curse - when it was aimed your way, Scott thought, it was gravity crushing a weak lifeform struggling to survive in an alien atmosphere.

"Nobody can ever be enough for you, nothing is ever enough. That shit opens up the void, and it never closes."

He tried to turn away from yet another lecture but those hands, those huge hands which pluck the strings of his bass with singular mastery, cup Scott's head.

"Every girl who has ever said to you: 'Why can't I be enough for you?', don't you think I'd say that to you too? Why can't we be enough for you? Why is that shit better that what I do to you with a song? What we do to each other onstage, and then the audience gets off on it too. And whatever else you want from me."

But it's the dark intensity, like the metallic melodic grinding riffs Rob composes easy as breathing, which Scott fears the most. Being swallowed by the other half of their obsession. Even as obsession is his defining characteristic.

"I've always been kind of scared of you, you know."

"More scared than dying?"

"Death does not scare me, man. There are worse things."

Those eyes do not stop trying to dig all the way to the bottom of the void, for whatever might be buried there.

 

 

The kissing, it was weird. But they were Italian, that's what Rob kept saying. Italians are passionate people.

His own brothers were lost to him, in their ways, and these brothers seemed to accept him without judgement, he didn't want to disappoint them. Though everyone was eventually disappointed.

Alone, he didn't need to worry about any of that. But you can't be alone in a band.

And Rob kissed him at one of the backyard barbeque beer bashes, in the dark, standing by a bucket full of melted ice and one bottle of Corona floating in it like a message from the past and it was a hot night, the smell of the smog lingered in the air along with smoke of various kinds, sweat and chemicals (again, of various kinds) and he stepped back, laughing.

"Man, I already called dibs on that blonde girl -"

"Fuck that. It's just 'cause I love you. So there."

Scott laughed again, and kissed him back. "I love you too, Robert," he said, in a breathy purr.

A shove. "You always know how to get in trouble, don't you?"

A wicked chuckle, his gentleman demon persona, and he knows it will have the intended effect as those eyes seek to devour the sight of him.

 

 

_When lying at the bottom of the well of betrayal, and the sky above is studded with stars_  
_the sky is as dark as your eyes_  
_wide as your arms_  
_but they couldn't hold me tightly enough_  
_to keep me from harm._  
_Your tough love isn't what I wanted_  
_but now you're crying on the phone_  
_feeling so guilty it leaves an oily taste_  
_in the back of your throat._

 

In one of his recurring dreams he was walking into a cave, which he had never done in his life.

(those dark corners)

And it was filled with glowworms which formed constellations, but none he'd ever seen. He walked, deeper and deeper into the cave, and it widened, and rose, and it was the world within the world. But he felt as though he couldn't breathe, so far below the surface.

(following blindly)

Finally, after many miles, to discover the hermit he'd come to see. So pale he glowed in that internal darkness, and frail, and seemingly unreal. But he knew the voice, when he heard it. And they talked about all the things they'd wanted to discuss in a far-flung past. All of the things he loved were there behind the words: the passion, the humor, the intelligence and that slightly skewed perspective. But he didn't otherwise recognize this cracked vessel. Until the hermit leaned forward and kissed him. He smelled like decay, the occluded reverse alchemy of decomposition.

"Obsession is stronger than love. Obsession is going to keep me here, but you have to go now. You always have to go, just like you always have to betray me. But I forgive you."

" **You** forgive **me**?" he started to say but then he drowned, and then he woke up, coughing, nearly screaming, gasping for breath.

It always ends the same. It always ends with him whispering, _why couldn't it be me?_


End file.
